FOSDEM is yet another one of those catchy acronyms that stands for nothing less than "Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting". KDE will again be hosting a room dedicated to talks and chat about the free desktop. These annual meetings are organised by volunteers, free of charge and generally recognised as one of the most productive gatherings available on the European stage. This year it will be held on the weekend of 24/25th February 2007 on the ULB Campus Solbosh in Brussels, Belgium.

The KDE community is getting ready to set a major milestone for the free desktop with the upcoming release of KDE 4. This will mark a new level of user experience, technical excellence in the framework and opportunities for free software on the desktop. The KDE contributors conference, which is part of aKademy, the world summit of the KDE community, will be the place to present the newest developments, long-term strategies or interesting input from the surrounding communities, projects and societies.

Linux Magazine have put their overview of aKademy 2006 -- the KDE World Conference -- online from their December 2006 issue. They describe how aKademy helped plan the road to KDE 4, and also report on the widely-successful OpenDocument day. There is also a review of KAlarm available from the same issue.

The Spanish KDE developers together with HispaLinux and ZaragozaWireless are organising a KDE Conference in Zaragoza, Spain on 4th and 5th of November. It is oriented towards people with good computer knowledge who want to get started with KDE programming and for users that want to know the present and future of graphical environments.

The annual KDE World Summit, aKademy, has found a home for 2007 in the vibrant city of Glasgow. The week-long event for contributors to the leading Free Desktop project will be held from 30th June to 7th July 2007 in Scotland's largest city. Our hosts will be the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde. There are three sub-events: a contributors conference, the KDE e.V.

Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame.

Last Wednesday the KDE regional groups Birds of a Feather session took place at aKademy 2006, Dublin. The focus of this BoF session was to share experiences that regional KDE-groups have had in building a community. A regional group is generally country based, e.g. KDE-IT for Italy and KDE-NL for Netherlands.

This year at aKademy 2006 there will be a BoF section to discuss KDE local groups. The issue will be how to spread KDE in your own country, helping each other and finding more to help in future. The starting point of the BoF will be the KDE Italia experience and then the experiences of all the groups will be put together to make sure we spread KDE all around the world. We will look at the available resources including the use of KDE regional websites.

We knew him as lilo. He was the founder of the Freenode IRC network, a place where many open source projects established a real-time meeting ground. Freenode is where we work, play, and share. It is where many a small idea has grown into a large project. It is where we are all enriched by the experience and diversity of a group of people from many cultures who all have in common a love of open source.